Cracking the human code | Human Genome Project

Ten years ago to the day, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair announced the publication of the first draft of the human genome, a landmark in the Human Genome Project to sequence the entire DNA blueprint for Homo sapiens

It all began in 1953 at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge as Francis Crick and James Dewey Watson tried to make their model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) fit together. They concluded that DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is made up of a double helix of sugar and phosphate 'backbones' joined by complementary sequences of base pairs – the letters of the genetic code

Automation has been central to the massive enterprise of sequencing the blueprints of living creatures. This early PCR (polymerase chain reaction) machine synthesised usable quantities of DNA from minuscule initial samples

Professor Robert May, left, the UK government's chief scientific officer, and Mike Dexter, director of the Wellcome Trust, share an infomal moment before the video link between Downing Street and the White House

John Sulston led the UK branch of the international sequencing effort. Here he is at his laboratory at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge in October 2002, after the announcement that he had won a share of that year's Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology

A chromatograph plotting the position of known genes prepared by the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. In April 2003 scientists announced that the decoding of the human genome was virtually complete, two years ahead of schedule